“Jesus does what no medicine man
or witch doctor is able to do.”

And they came to Jesus and saw the demon-possessed man,
the one who had had the legion, sitting there,
clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. – Mark 5:15

Rich Bledsoe’s old blog is a goldmine. Here’s an excerpt from The Dysfunctional Family of the Gadarene Madman.

A friend of mine who is a Christian clergyman, and is from India, and has demonstrated gifts of exorcism, tells me that the power of the witch doctor is the power of being able to command lesser demons to leave by the power of a greater demon. But the demons are never banished. They just transfer place or position. In the case of this text, the demons of the village were all put on this one poor man who became a representative demoniac, and bore the pain and agony of the entire community in himself.

There are four descriptors around the demoniac that we need to look at.

First, he is chained, but in his madness is so crazed that he breaks the chains and cannot be restrained. He is the recipient of the accusations of the demons of the village. The very character of the devil is that his is “an accuser” (Revelation 12:10, Zechariah 3:1). Accusation is the most galling of all experiences, and he is accused day and night by the devils who have taken possession of him who used to accuse the community. Now along with the demons, the whole village also accuse him.

Secondly, he is naked. (Luke 8:27, Mark 5:15) This is a symbol of shame, and he thus bears the shame of the entire community.

Thirdly, the text says that he cuts himself with stones (Mark 5:5). In the Greek, the term is “autolapsis”, which literally translated means “self stoning”. In other words, the madman executes himself by stoning, which in the ancient world was a ritual form of execution. Hence, he is executed on behalf of the community as well. Finally, he lives amongst the tombs, (Mark 5:2, 5) which as a fulfillment of the other curses on him means that he is already dead. He bears death and damnation in himself for the whole rest of the community.

The demons immediately begin to beg that they not be sent out of the country, and beg instead that they might be sent into a herd of swine that are nearby. Now, this is ambiguous. The swine are in fact a mirror image of the village. There are about 2000 pigs (Mark 5:13), and in fact the demons may be begging to be allowed to re-enter the people in the village, for whom the madman is a surrogate. To the demons, the people are as unclean as the pigs, and either allows for their occupation. But Jesus mercifully does not send them back to the village people, but instead sends them into the nearby pigs, and they, driven mad by the incursion into them, rush off of a cliff and into the Sea of Galilee.

To fall into the sea is to fall into the abyss. In doing this, Jesus does what no medicine man or witch doctor is able to do. He does not just exchange one demon for another from one place to another, and that in a temporary fashion, but Jesus banishes them forever, and sends them back to the abyss.

I recommend reading the entire article, and its sequel, The Gadarene Madman and the Modern World. Bledsoe demonstrates that the relationship between the demoniac and community are exactly the kind of “triangulation” observed by Edwin Friedman to be the problem in all dysfunctional relationships, whether personal, familial, institutional or corporate.

Of course, I have to tie this to the matrix, at least its “festal” strand. The first chapters of Matthew follow the Feasts, and place this event at Atonement. [1] This means that the communal dysfunction of scapegoating (as expounded by René Girard, particularly concerning the treatment of Job by his advisors [2]) is Man’s unjust, twisted method for obtaining corporate healing without reference to the mercy of God. It replicates the reaction of Cain to God’s atoning mercy (an event which also appears at Atonement within the narrative of Genesis 4). The scapegoat in the end was not Abel, although that was Cain’s intention. Abel himself became an acceptable offering. The scapegoat was Cain himself, who could not bear his shame and so rejected the mercy of God. The community he founded was a primeval “Gadara,” and Lamech continued to deal with its demons through bloodshed. The blame shifting continued until the entire culture was cutting itself. [3] The bloodletting continued and  increased until the Great Flood.

These primeval events were similar expressions of blame-shifting. “Shifting” is the work of the witch doctor. It’s a form of “cooking the books.” Rather than take the shame and blame and be forgiven, fallen corporate Man (Greater Eve) can’t take vengeance upon historical Adam, so she finds someone else to take the rap. Of course, the time came when the Man she found to vent her fury upon, in a demonic hysteria, was her One True Husband. This led to unfathomable mercy, but also to the avenging of all the scapegoats in the history of atonement, beginning with Abel, in AD70. The Revelation tells us the story of their enthronement.

In the end, it is God who cooks the books. Jesus is the Great Medicine Man, the White Witch Doctor. But He removes our sins from us as far as the East is from the West.

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[1] See Why Jesus Healed Some.

[2] James Jordan writes:

Job is clearly some kind of king. He is the leader of his community. He is the Chief Cornerstone, while Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar are his “three mighty men,” the other corners of the realm. It is because Job is the king that the other men arrive to try and force him to step down.

(The Hebrew word for “army commander” is “corner.” For other examples of chief corners and three other corners, consider David and his three mighty men, Daniel and his three friends, and Jesus with Peter, James, and John. On “corners” and “three mighty men,” see Biblical Horizons 121. Compare also Jesus with the Caiaphas, Herod, and Pilate, as discussed above.)

Job as king is the “greatest of the men of the east” (Job 1:3). He employed hundreds of people and fed the poor. The disaster that overcame his household was, thus, a disaster upon the entire realm. The poor were starving, and hundreds of people were either killed or out of work. The sores on Job’s body were a sign of the lesions on the body politic of which he was the head, a point no ancient reader would miss.

This realm or political “house” has fallen because the Chief Corner, Job, has fallen. The other three corners, thus, step in to try and repair it. Their fallacy is not in seeking to restore their society, but in the way they seek to do it. Their desire is for Job to step down by admitting fault, so that one of them can replace him. God’s intention, however, is to take Job and this society through judgment and resurrection, and to reconstitute a new and better society afterwards (as happens in chapter 42).

Job’s position as king or leader of his people has been skillfully analyzed by Rene Girard in Job: The Victim of His People, translated by Yvonne Freccero and published by Stanford University Press in 1987. Despite the many flaws in this book, it makes clear that the attack upon Job came not because he was an ordinary person, but because of his preeminent position in this community, which had fallen into chaos seemingly as a result of God’s judgment upon Job, their “king.”

The book of Job, then, is not just about the sufferings of a righteous man, though it is that in part, and can be preached that way. It is also about chaos in the body politic, and the position of the suffering king within that chaos.

James B. Jordan, Was Job an Edomite King?, Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 130.

[3] The innocent victims in our society are most obviously the unborn. But perhaps this sheds some light on the growing problem of self-harm in our culture. Biblically, we should also remember the priests of Baal on Carmel cutting themselves. Paul ties this factor to the Circumcision in the first century, those who considered it to be somehow redemptive rather than simply signal.

“Rivers of water run down from my eyes,
because men do not keep Your law.” Psalm 119:136

I might bag out [1] the Biblical Horizons crowd for their views on baptism, but otherwise they are giants. They have a hold on Scripture and history that enables them to understand the times.

Rich Blesdsoe recently made the observation that the unbelief which constantly confronts us Western Christians is quite a different animal to the demonism found in other cultures. We don’t suffer the full-scale “possessions” seen in pagan cultures. The rebellion is just as self-destructive, as crazed and zealous, and just as much a “nothing” as the idols of the pagans, but it is a different kind of nothing. What’s going on in our culture?

[This post has been refined and included in Sweet Counsel: Essays to Brighten the Eyes.]

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One more Friedman post. Rich Bledsoe commented that the Biblical Covenant structure is very apparent in Friedman’s writings. Here’s a few of Mr Friedman’s principles for understanding the nature of true and false leadership (I have left quite a few of them out, as they wouldn’t make sense without his elaboration). For the whole outline, you’ll just have to get the book.

1   Society

1. The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society—reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership—will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.
2. When any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.
3. All pathogenic (that is, destructive) organisms, forces, and institutions, whether we are considering viruses, malignant cells, chronically troubling individuals, or totalitarian nations, lack self-regulation and are therefore invasive by nature and cannot be expected to learn from their experience.
4. A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.

2   Relationships

1. It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.
2. Increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.
3. Stress and burnout are relational rather than quantitative, and are due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems. [MB: In other words, it's not your workload, but the emotional nature of the burden that burns you out.]
4. In any partnership, the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.
5. In any stuck relationship between and overadequate member and an underadequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.
6. In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.

3   Self

1. Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather that in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
2. What is essential are stamina, resolve, remaining connected, the capacity for sef-regulation of reactivity, and having horizons beyond what one can actually see.
3. There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.
4. Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because we were prescient, bu because of the way we function after we make the decision.

4   Leadership

1. Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.
2. Clearly-defined, non-anxious leadership promotes healthy differentiation throughout a system, while reactive, peace-at-all-costs, anxious leadership does the opposite.
3. Differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well-differentiated others in the system.
4. The unmotivated are notoriously invulnerable to insight.
5. People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.
6. The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.

Everything you know about leadership is wrong.

The five-fold Covenant pattern is found throughout the Bible. Those who claim that Deuteronomy’s shape was borrowed from other Ancient Near East cultures need to explain how it could then be found not only in the Ten Commandments, but in the shape of every story going back to Genesis 1. Their theorizing is the result of their deluded, naturalistic worldview, and Christian scholars suck it right up.

Edwin Friedman’s observations on leadership training fit right in with the Transcendence/Hierarchy arrangement in the Covenant documents, and also the totus Christus revelation of the New Testament. If we believe the Bible is true, what else would be expect? We should have started with the Bible. It cracks our blind theories wide open.

Here’s Friedman:

I also saw something else regarding leadership and systemic emotional process that ultimately revolutionized my approach to leadership training. When creative, imaginative, self-starting members of an organization are being sabotaged rather than supported, the poorly differentiated person “at the top” does not have to be in direct contact with the person being undercut. In fact, neither even has to know that the other exists. What I began to appreciate from that moment on was the wide-ranging systemic power of leadership—specifically, that the functioning of leaders somehow affected the institution they lead on a far more fundamental level than could be accounted for by traditional psychological concepts that focus on the brain, such as role-modeling, emulation, identification, or personality profiles. Institutions, I was coming to see, could be conceptualized as emotional fields—environments of force that, for all their influence over people’s thinking processes, were, like magnetic fields or gravitational fields, largely invisible to the naked eye.

What made these systemic processes invisible was the fact that they could not be explained by the usual mechanistic models that emphasize flow charts, trickle-down concepts, and motivational techniques. It was not that such models were wrong, but rather that they were inadequate for understanding the organic nature of human colonization. Explaining families and institutions in terms of the nature of their parts, I began to think, was like trying to reduce chemistry to physics…

Relational processes in an institution, I included, cannot be reduced to psychodynamic or personality factors in the individuals of which they consist. A different level of inquiry was required that one that tries merely to understand “the minds” or personalities of the individuals involved.

What was needed to account for the connection between leader and follower, I was beginning to realize, was an approach that did not separate them into neat categories nor polarize them into opposite forces, nor even see them as completely discrete entities. Rather, what was needed to explain an emotional process orientation to leadership was a concept that was less moored to linear cause-and-effect thinking. It had to be one that conceptualized the connection between leader and follower as reciprocal and as part of larger natural processes, many of which, I came to realize, were intergenerational. Leadership in both families and organizations, I was beginning to see, was rooted in processes that could be found in all colonized life. After all, had not Nature seen to its being built into pods, prides, swarms, schools, flocks, and herds?

…Eventually, I found an uncanny parallel that enabled me to put leader and follower together conceptually in a systemic way. The parallel lies between the latest understanding of the connection between the brain and the body in a human organism, on the one hand, and the effects of a “head’s” functioning on a “body politic” in a human organization, on the other. For in any age, concepts of leadership must square with the latest understanding of the relationship between brain and body. Recent findings about the brain-body connection have the potential have to revolutionize our concept of hierarchy. For they suggest that to a large extent we have a liquid nervous system. The brain turns out to function like a gland. It is the largest organ of secretion, communicating simultaneously with various parts of the body, both near and far, through the reciprocal transmission of substances known as neurotransmitters. In other words, the head is present in the body!

So, too, the connection between a “head” and body in any family or institution is not necessarily a function of proximity. The functioning of a “head” can systemically influence all parts of a body simultaneously, and totally bypass linear, “head-bone-connected-to-the-neck-bone” thinking. What counts is the leader’s presence and being, not technique and know-how…

My growing awareness of the universality of these systemic principles of leadership raise fundamental questions in my mind about the nature of most leadership training courses (including courses on parenting) that puts primary emphasis on others (children or employees) as objects to be motivated rather than on the systemic effects of the presence, or self, of the leader. [1]

When God makes a new Covenant, it always begins with the Preamble, the part where He announces Who He is. “I am the Lord your God.” God makes Himself distinct from His delegate/s. In this way, He can be present in all of them.

We see this numerous times throughout the Old Testament, but most importantly in the words of Christ.

“Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” (John 16:7)

As a leader, you must not be aloof. But you must be distinct. A veil, a firmament must be drawn between you and those you lead until you are ready to hand over the job. When the time for succession comes, the veil is torn and your successor sees you face to face. You speak your plans openly and call them your friend, as Jesus did with His disciples, and as God did with Abraham.

Friedman’s book presents ideas that contradict modern wisdom. They are revolutionary ideas to us, but they are ideas that are millennia old, and fully accessible in that dusty ancient book on your shelf.

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Art: Jerusalem Stone.

[1] Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, pp. 16-18. I’d love to share some more of Friedman’s scathing observations of modern “how-to” leadership strategies and our fixation with data. Better if you just get the book and read it for yourself.

God loves fractals. He (Father) speaks (Spirit) the Word (Son) and everything He creates is made in the image of the Triune, three distinct, yet indivisible, named parts working as one.

The Holy of Holies is triune. The Name (Word) dwells invisibly above the blood (Sacrament) on the kapporet (Government). Then, of course, we have the Most Holy, the Holy, and the Laver (the Laver is a beaten out “firmament” like the kapporet). Moving out again, and we have the Tent as Garden, the Tabernacle enclosure as Land, and outside the enclosure as World. Again, and we have the Tabernacle itself as Garden, Israel as Land, and Gentile “Sea” as World. Out again and we have Heaven (the true mountain of God) as Garden, the physical Land as, well, Land, and the physical sea as the Laver.

The human body is the same. Your head is Word, your body is Sacrament, and what you do with your limbs is Government. Within this, your head has a three-decker structure, with your brain “behind the Veil” flanked by two witnesses, ears as Servanthood and Dominion, nose for Incense, and mouth as Government (a court governed by your angelic teeth!). Apparently, within even this architecture, your brain has a three-decker structure.  Edwin Friedman writes:

In 1990 Dr. Paul McLean, who had studied the human brain for more than thirty years at the National Institutes of Health, published a monumental volume entitled The Triune Brain. His thesis is that the human brain has three distinct parts, each of which developed at a different stage of evolution but evolved in an interconnected fashion, with information flowing reciprocally in both directions between all three parts. The brain, in other words, is itself a history, if not a manifestation, of the evolution of our species.

Other organs such as the kidneys, the lungs, the pancreas, or the bladder seem to have ceased evolving after reaching a form that fit their function. The brain, on the other hand, keeps changing its size and shape as animal life has evolved, so that the brain appears to be a hodgepodge. It is as though the Creator or Evolution had after-thoughts. The human brain has brown in weight from the few ounces found in reptiles to the “enormous” full pound found in early humans to its present “whopping” size of three pounds. But Dr. McLean has shown that the earliest brains have not been replaced by newer models. Rather, they remain as the substructure onto which new forms have been built, and into which new forms have been plugged. In fact, the older brain forms that still reside beneath, or at the base of, the modern human brain are structurally and chemically identical to their forerunners in reptiles and mammals.

At the base of the human brain, says McLean, is a bundle of nerve connections that is totally absent of thought processes. Its bailiwick is instinct. He has dubbed this the “reptilian brain.” Above that is the part of the brain that fills most of the cranium. It allows for thinking on rudimentary levels and evolved with early mammals. he has called this the “mammalian brain.” It is in the mammalian part of the brain that we find the apparatus for creating lasting relationships and therefore families. For it is in the mammalian brain that we first find the seat for nurturing, for playfulness, and for vocal communication.

The third part of the brain is the cortex, the half-inch layer at the top that most people think of as the “real” brain, and its frontal lobe, known as the neo-cortex. It is the cortex that is the center of intellectual activity, and it is the neo-cortex that allows for philosophical speculation, deep problem-solving, intricate strategies, leaders, healers, and, eventually, leadership training programs. But, as mentioned, even the cortex is not really a “central processing unit.” For the most part, the cortex functions interdependently with its reptilian and mammalian precursors. This is as true in gathering data as in making decisions. The information each part processes is to some extent modified by the information simultaneously processed by the other two parts. [1]

Well, of course I don’t go for the assertion that the brain evolved from these lower levels. The brain is no more a hodgepodge than the Tabernacle was, or the world is. The human brain is an ark. It has a place for the mediators in the Garden, the beasts in the Land, and the creeping things down below. And all parts are required to work in harmony for a fully functioning being made in the image of God. Like the Trinity, the brain is an indivisible three in one.

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[1] Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, pp. 119-120.

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Edwin H. Friedman writes:

“Living with crisis is a major part of leaders’ lives. The crises come in two major varieties: (1) those that are not of their own making but are imposed on them from outside or within the system; and (2) those that are actually triggered by the leaders through doing precisely what they should be doing.”

(A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, p. 27)

“Recall the phrase: ‘Poor planning on your part does not constitute a crisis on my part’.  The less mature are always attempting to enroll others in their disquiet, their ‘crisis du jour’. A perceived catastrophe on the part of certain members of the congregation does not constitute a calamity for a well-defined leader.”

“Edwin Friedman, in Generation to Generation defines a leader as a self-defined person with a non-anxious presence… A non-anxious presence does not mean carefree, laid-back, detached, disengaged.  It means an absence of anxiety.”

“As Friedman noted some 15 years ago, most of us are leading chronically anxious emotional dwarfs. In many denominational systems, the church has become one of the hideouts for the immature. Sad. We could be the most powerful, clear, selfless, and confident people on the planet.”

Read more.

(HT: Jon Amos)